“Holy Smoke finds us in Rome at the end of the war, a new location for Robinson
but one which has his customary cast of liars, saboteurs and arsonists.
Everyone will have their particular favourite; one of mine is Captain
Ironside, whom I nominate as the statutory ‘awkward bugger’, a fixture in
so many Robinson books. What is conjured up for our delight is the
amorality of a city staggering out of war, in a state of mind which
- with an almost total disregard of government and law -
enabled Italy to slip from Fascism to democracy. I loved it and thought it
a perfect topic and cast for the Robinson treatment. My one disappointment
- the Albanian dwarves were an authorial
invention.”

A heartwarming comedy of deceit, deception, power-seeking and
revenge, set in the liberated Rome of 1944. Based on fact. Similar
to my Luis Cabrillo novels, but completely different. No aircraft.
Many jokes. Self published - a slim volume, only 170 pages, which explains the low price.

He was walking along a wide and busy corridor. With him were a colonel, Randall
Stuart, and a major, Fred Stoner. Stuart had just outlined a plan toinfiltrate into Albania a number of male dwarves
who were fluent in the language and the customs of the country. Their
task would be to sabotage German armycommunications and to stimulate Albanian partisans. Stuart said that dwarves had an inbuilt advantage as secret
agents because nobody suspected them...

My first novel featured the SE5a biplane, After that, I
worked my way through the Sopwith Camel, the Bristol Fighter, the Hurricane,
the Tomahawk, the Hampden, the Wellington, and eventually the Avro
Vulcan - all of which are now museum pieces, if they
survive at all. So it’s good to hear from a pilot who has read my stuff and has
known the trials of military flying at first hand. Since he’s a serving
officer, I’ll call him Peter (not his real name). Operational security,
he tells me, is the flavour of the month.

Peter tells me he “first encountered Piece of Cake
via the TV series when he was still at primary school.” He next came across
the book at the age of 18, when he joined the University Air Squadron. He
recalls: “Reading Piece of Cake for the first time as an adult
was a game-changer for me, and immediately I bought the sequel (A Good
Clean Fight) and your RFC trilogy, which I also loved.” He flew with
the Fleet Air Arm. Fast-forward a few years. Now he’s still flying
but he has a son and they’re both deep in aviation history. He says: “A large
part of that is due to the influence of your writing... Please accept my
sincere gratitude for your thorough historical research combined with your
incredible flair for storytelling, and for writing things the way they were
rather than the way many people think they were.”

Peter has sometimes been at the sharp end of military aviation
and he knows the symptoms. He writes: “I was intrigued by Woolley
in the RFC trilogy - the fact that he ends one book (Hornet’s
Sting) as a level-headed, approachable good egg, and then begins the next
book (Goshawk Squadron) as a complete bastard. I liked this
transition - particularly that there isn’t any obvious
and telegraphed reason why - because it is a
fascinating and realistic depiction of a man suffering from the effects of real
fatigue and stress, and the reader needs to work that out for himself. Whilst
the reasons why have changed over the years, the symptoms are exactly the same
and we occasionally still see those transitions in aviation today
- although thankfully for us the understanding and care provided in
the industry in this day and age have come on leaps and bounds.”

Moving on. One of the problems of writing fiction is
that some readers think a character is unbelievable while, in real life,
people are even weirder. I’ve been looking back at previous editions of
Readers Write, and examples sprang out. There was Stephen, reading Goshawk
Squadron in front of a log fire until the early hours, when he nodded
off, “When I awoke, a puppy had eaten the last pages.” People have
been known to steal my books. One man read Hornet’s Sting
in the bath, dropped it and all the pages stuck together. Jim was so
obsessed with my RFC quartet that his wife gave him a flight in a Sopwith Camel
for his 50th birthday. A chap in New
York read Red Rag Blues and laughed so much
that he ended up in hospital. (Mind you, he already had a bad chest
cold.) I sent him a copy of the sequel, Operation Bamboozle,
and he said he would read it “with a pacemaker handy”.

And various people have told me that my stuff helped them
survive being in the army, or fighting in Iraq
or Afghanistan,
or even recovering from a nervous breakdown. One fan wrote to tell me that I
was his role model; but I knew he was a former rugby player and so I
assumed that he’d taken too many knocks on the head. But sometimes I
wonder whether my books might have damaged a promising career. Martin told me
he couldn’t put down Hornet’s Sting and ended up reading it in the
office, “surreptitiously, almost under the table.” And Pete, in the Isle of Wight, remembered that he bought Cake
after work, took it home, went to bed and reached the last page by 2
a.m., so he began it again and was still re-reading at 8 in the morning.
“Phoned in work to call in sick so I could finish it,” he said. A real test of
stamina. Or chutzpah. Maybe I should put a health warning on the
cover. “I’ve bought 4 or 5 copies over the years,” Pete says, “and given
them away to friends, in the firm belief that they will find them as
fantastically entertaining as I did.” All is forgiven, Pete.

Time for a picture. Here’s a clue: it’s 100
octane, and don’t light a match near it.

I used to get a bit of flak, mainly from the top brass,
about the amount of alcohol drunk by pilots in the RFC quartet.
Especially in Hornet’s Sting. When you look at the cover
illustration - Bristol Fighters battling with a
thunderstorm, painted by the brilliant Anthony Cowland
- you get a taste of the everyday dangers that those aircrew
faced. Patrols were hazardous, with or without the enemy, and a pilot’s
life might be short. While it lasted, it was celebrated for all it was
worth. In the book (it’s on page 136 of the paperback),
Cleve-Cutler, the CO, knows how to revive the squadron on special occasions,
whether good or bad:

“He
let whim and inspiration guide him as he emptied bottles

into a galvanised
hipbath. Brandy and champagne were a good

base, followed by
port, gin, apple juice, fresh ground pepper,

more champagne, a
couple of bottles of Guinness, some rum,

a blast of soda
water for fizz, a splash of Benedictine for good luck.”

That was just the beginning. If you want to know what
the results might look like, see above.

Garth, an old pal in Manhattan,
mixed up a batch of Hornet’s Sting for his New Year’s Eve party, using the
recipe in the book. Personally, I think it looks like oxtail soup, but Garth
says it turned purple when he stirred it. What matters is his guests
liked it, which may be because the temperature in New York on that day was 12 below zero and
forecast to be 29 below at night.

Just time for another picture.

Curtiss built fifteen thousand of these Warhawks in World
War Two, and supplied them to 28 nations. In Britain, the
fighter was known as the Kittyhawk or the Tomahawk. It was often used for
low-level ground-attack, one of the themes in A Good Clean Fight.
Pilots liked it because it was rugged. Built like a brick, they
said. Some said it flew like a brick, too. But America made a
lot of them and in war you fight with what you’ve got. The Desert Air
Force was glad to have them.

Why 1914?
is "the best short introduction to the causes of the first world war I
have come across. Derek Robinson is as vivid and trustworthy a historian as
he is a novelist.”
Nicholas Lezard - The Guardian

Here's a taste of what you get:

“The Black Hand recruited Gavrilo Princip and two others to murder the
Archduke. All three young men had incurable tuberculosis. They were ordered to
kill themselves when the Archduke was dead. Phials of cyanide were handed out.
What could possibly go wrong? In the event, everything. Especially the
cyanide.”

"To find war news in July 1914 you have to look at Ireland. Home Rule had been
passed. Ulster, largely Protestant, detested the Catholic south. Gun-running
was on an industrial scale. The government was trapped in an Irish bog.”

"In 1914, Kaiser William II, commanding the most powerful army in Europe, was not
so much a loose cannon as a whole battery of loose cannons.”

"Admiral
Tirpitz, Navy Minister, held the job for 19 years and followed one plan
throughout his career: more battleships, and then more battleships. The Kaiser
said that ‘with every new German battleship there was laid a fresh pledge for
peace’. Yet Tirpitz was using his battleships to frighten Britain into
silence.”

"On 15 August 1914, Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery wrote in his diary: ‘At least
the thing will be over in three weeks."

”If Germany seized
the Channel ports, this would be hugely damaging to Britain’s strategic
position. Britain went to war for Belgium’s sake, and for her
own.”

"In 1914 the German army did not talk to the German navy.
For eight days in August an armada of ships transported the British army to
France without disturbance.”

"The British infantry’s name for its rapid rifle-fire was
‘mad minute’: a trained rifleman could fire fifteen rounds a minute. This was
often mistaken for machine-gun fire.”

"Confidence of success
fuelled German troops’ drive for victory. All Germany shared this confidence:
friends and family wrote letters to German soldiers with the address ‘in or near
Paris’. (The postal service being neutral, sacks of this mail reached Paris.)”

"Winning the Battle of Ypres gave the Allies no strategic advantage
but it became a heroic trophy simply because Germany wanted it so badly.”

The Paperback is available only directly fromthe author
Prices

In
UK
£8
In Europe
£10
Rest of
World
£12.50

Preferred payment method - PayPal

Email your order to me at delrobster@gmail.com and you will receive a Payment Request. Then all you need is a credit card to pay into my PayPal account.

Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian chooses Why 1914 as one of his Paperbacks of the Year, writing: "The
novelist Derek Robinson, 82 this year, just keeps going, and his prose
is as sharp and sprightly as ever (there is something of Evelyn Waugh
about its economy and grip)... This year he has written and
self-published the best introduction to the causes of the first
world war, Why 1914?, I have come across. He is as vivid and
trustworthy a historian as he is a novelist."Robert Allison puts A Good Clean Fight in his top 10 of desert warfare novels, saying, “Well above genre standards, thanks
to its energetic storytelling, its wealth of factual detail , and the author’s
trademark gallows humour."Click to read the full article.

Reviewing A Splendid Little War, Nick Lezard writes: "Robinson has pulled off a remarkable coup. It's as bleakly intelligent as anything he has done but he has also increased our historical understanding."Click to read the full review.

Describing Derek Robinson's war novels, Antonia Senior said:"No
one writes about war quite like Robinson, despite attempts to shroud
him in echoes of other writers, such as Joseph Heller or Norman Mailer.
He writes with a bleak savagery, in controlled, precise prose. There is
humour – and it is dark and painful. There is love – and it is
inadequate and messy. Most of all there is death. It comes from clear
blue skies and grey clouds, from enemy fire and friendly mistakes. Ithovers, unseen, at 15,000 feet." Click to read the full article.

************************************************* A Splendid Little War
is now available in paperback.

It's
1919. The Great War is over but a civil war is raging in Russia.
Bolshevik Reds are fighting White Russians, and a volunteer
R.A.F. squadron, flying clapped-out Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers,
arrives to duff up the Reds. But the 'splendid little war' they
are promised turns out to be big and brutal, a world of armoured train,
anarchist guerillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies.
There is comedy, but it is the bleakest kind. A Splendid Little War shows war as it is: grim, funny, moving - but never splendid.Reviews of A Splendid Little War

When
someone at a
party asks
what I do, I say I write Ripping Yarns. It's a quick answer
but a
very incomplete one. I'm best known for my novels about the Royal
Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in the two World Wars and some
might say the books are highly readable adventure stories.
Nothing wrong with that, but there's more than combat in the high blue
yonder - there's also memorable
characters,
there's unexpected twists and turns of warfare, and there's
aircrew humour. Especially the humour. I
did my
National Service in the Royal Air Force. I was never
airborne; I
was in a Ground Control Interception Unit, deep underground in a
concrete bunker. But I learned a lot about the special humour
of
flying people, and it emerges naturally and unavoidably in my
novels. Humour is one of the essential colours in the spectrum of life.
You don't make a story more serious by removing the humour; you just
make it less true.

The
longer I do this job,
the luckier I know I am. For a start, I'm English and the
English
language is global. That's pure luck of birth. I might have been born
in Hungary. There are good Hungarian writers, but
it's a
lot easier for me to find readers throughout the English-speaking
world. And I was lucky to have literate parents.
When I
grew up there were always books and magazines about the house, unlike
some other kids' homes. There was a good public library at the end of
the street. And there was the 1944 Education Act which
created
State Scholarships for bright lads and helped me get into Cambridge.

That's
where I learned to
write boringly. I was writing to impress, not to inform. Twelve years
in advertising agencies (London and New York) kicked the crap out of my
style. Every word had to work hard. I wrote ad copy and commercials for
everything from Esso petrol to The Wall Street Journal.
Always I knew I wanted to move on, to be a fulltime writer
- but I had nothing to say. Nothing worth reading,
anyway.
(I was a late developer.) I wrote two bad and unpublishable novels and
finally got it right with a story called Goshawk
Squadron.
Might have won the Booker Prize if Saul Bellow, one of the judges, had
had his way. Not important. "The most readable novel of the year," Nina
Bawden said of Goshawk in the Daily
Telegraph. "I
laughed aloud several times, and was in the end reduced to tears."
That's worth more than any prize. The first novel bought me enough time
to write the second, and so it goes. Lucky me..

MacLehose Press (an imprint of Quercus Books) has published all of my flying novels - four
Royal Flying
Corps books and four Royal Air Force books. Here are the new covers:

Click
here
to go to the MacLeHose website. where you can click on their
individual covers for purchase options, including e-books.

This
will
be the first time that all my flying titles are in print from the same
publisher: something that gives me great satisfaction.
Equally
satisfying is the work of Tony Cowland, who has painted the cover
illustrations for all the books. Each cover looks dramatically
different, yet together they have a family likeness. They form a
splendid collection, and they appeared at The Mall Galleries (near
Admiralty Arch) in the Aviation Paintings of the
Year Exhibition by the Guild of Aviation Artists. The standard was high. My
congratulations to Tony on a memorable achievement.

Artist and Author
Photograph: Chris French

SALESMORE
GOOD NEWSAll
four of the Luis Cabrillo novels (following the career of
probably the best WW2 double agent and later con-man) are now
available as eBooks from Amazon/Kindle. Here are the covers:

Click on a
cover to go to the
Amazon sales page.The R.F.C. trilogy and the R.A.F.
Quartet are also available as e-books.

OPERATION
BAMBOOZLE

'Operation Bamboozle' is a fastmoving black comedy about what happens
when a high-stakes con artist takes on the Mob in Los
Angeles.
The result is a heady brew of disorganised crime, hot dollars, triple
virgins and dead bodies in the begonias.

Luis Cabrillo is the con artist, Julie Conroy is
his
squeeze, and here's the opening sentence:

For a man who had been hauled out of Lake Michigan in 1949, headless,
his legs and arms broken, and stabbed in the heart with a red ballpoint
pen, Frankie Blanco was in pretty good shape in 1953.

Luis Cabrillo
rides again in
this "dashing
tale of
Nazis and Mafiosi", as The Observer called it.

In fact, Nazis and Mafiosi play second fiddle to the
real
dynamo in this story. It's 1953, and Senator Joe McCarthy's
witchhunt for Reds under beds is scaring America witless.

Cue Luis Cabrillo, ex-double agent, now con artist
supreme.
Dollars flow, hotly pursued by bullets. Luis doesn't know
it, but
FBI, MI5, KGB and CIA have him firmly in their sights. Not to
mention Stevie, the only three-times married virgin in New
York
City. This is a rich, fast and very black comedy.

MacLehose
Press (an imprint of Quercus Books) owns the book rights to all my RFC
and RAF novels. Sam Goldwyn Jr owns the
screen rights
to Goshawk Squadron. In 1988, LWT made a six-part
television
series of Piece of Cake and they own the
rights to that
production. I own the screen rights to any remake of Piece
of Cake. I own the screen rights to all my other
novels.
Quercus Books owns the e-book rights to all my fiction backlist,
available through Amazon/Kindle.Derek
Robinson

ContactI
welcome comments and views about my books, though as a working writer I
can't guarantee to have sufficient time to answer everyone.

All
my fiction is available as e-books. Maclehose Press publish (in
print) all eight of my flying novels, available from any good book
seller (who may have to order a copy). Or you could try the
websites listed below, often useful for tracking down both new and used
books.

The two Bristle books, and A Darker Side of Bristol are published by Countryside Books .